On Films Containing Sexual Content

By Robin Phillips

Television & Sex

It is hard, if not impossible, to watch the television very long without seeing some form of sexual content. Whether such content takes the form of a ‘sex scene’ or is simply directly or indirectly suggestive of sex, you can’t get away from it. It is unusual to even get through a series of commercials without being assailed with images that are sexually provocative.

In this essay I would like to address the ethical questions raised by the situation I have just described. Before doing so, however, I would like to first look at an important criterion by which we can assess any art form.

The Movement of the Soul

All art - whether music, poetry, the visual arts, the dramatic arts, etc. - shares in common one essential ingredient. The aspect to which I refer is the sense in which art evokes movement in the soul.

A few words about movement. In a purely biological sense mankind is in a constant state of flux, like the drops of water in a river. The molecules that comprise my body are constantly replacing themselves. In the span of seven years every single cell in our body changes. Yet we know that there is continuity though we may change and grow over time. What gives us this sense of continuity & our sense of self? The soul. The soul both transcends the mechanical aspect of our self but also gives meaning, glory and significance to us as people and to our physical bodies. Now to say that the soul is the continuum of the human person is not to imply that it is stationary. The soul is like a river, a stream of constant movement and yet at the same time being a continuum. The various molecules of our body are like drops of water in a river. Without the river-ness the various drops of water would have no relation to the whole. Without our soul we would merely be a collection of particulars.

Now the moving continuum of the soul is in fact part of the moving dynamism of all existence. Nothing in the universe stands still, not even the smallest atom. Human experience is organized around movement, whether years, months, seasons, daytime and night time, etc.. This parallels the movement of the earth, the moon, the stars, the seasons, etc.. It is not just movement, it is repeating movement. The seasons always return, the successive pattern of daytime and nighttimes remains unbroken till the end of time. The heart continually beats and your lungs continually breath - to cease to do so is to die.. This repeating movement, as opposed to mere movement, we may call rhythm. Though not all movement in the world is rhythmic - the movement of aging is not rhythmic - certainly rhythmic movement is at the heart of reality.

It is a profound question to ask where all this movement is going, if anywhere. Progress lies at the heart of reality, and in human affairs the pursuit of progress motivates almost everything we do. Even those things that we complain about as indicative of ‘lack of progress’ are themselves the vain attempt at progress.

I believe all this movement, whether in the natural realm of the realm of human affairs, represents the soul's inbred sense of becoming, of striving after what we may call the Good. Even the pursuit of evil, it can be argued, involves a perceived good, or the attempt to achieve something good - say, pleasure, contentment, satisfaction, security - in the wrong way.

Good Art and Bad Art

I would like to suggest that the fundamental action of any art form is to appeal to this movement of the soul. For example, you look at a painting and it moves your imagination, mind or emotions somewhere. While visual arts like painting and sculpture move something within the viewer, art forms such as music and poetry move themselves and draw the participant along in the flow. In whatever way it does so, art moves (or, as we shall see, should move) a person so that we come away not quite the same person as before. Herein lies art's greatest gift to mankind but it is also art’s greatest danger. For movement can be one of two ways: the soul may be edified and brought closer to the Good or it may defile and take us away from the Good. In much contemporary art there is a great struggle to abort movement. It is a struggle because it goes against the basic fabric of reality. Visual art that has no meaning outside itself, that leads you into the work but does not lead you out to something higher or something beyond yourself, or music that lacks a sense of rhythmic or tonal continuity - all such things represent the attempt to abort the soul's movement. Or consider the repetitive orgiastic music so popular today, music that sucks your soul and body into a repetitive rhythm. The rhythm becomes an end in itself like the ‘art for art’s sake’ that has no frame of reference external to itself. The ‘thud, thud, thud’ of this kind of beat is wholly different to the forward-moving rhythms we find in the world, or even in jazz and calypso music.

There are many other ways in which people of today have attempted to stop the soul’s movement. Think of the way many people try to perpetuate their juvenility by idolizing the teenage years, or the fact that there is a multimillion-dollar industry for researching how to disguise the affects of aging.

Building on the above ideas, I would like to suggest that there are two ways in which art can be bad. It can be bad because it moves our soul in a direction away from what is good, or it can be bad because it attempts to make our soul stand still. If the soul could ever stand completely still it would die. (When I use the word 'stillness' in this context I mean stagnation and not the quietness and repose which actually leads to growth in one's soul.)

Because movement is so basic to the human soul, art has an immediate inroad into the soul and penetrates us very deeply. Usually this movement is imperceptible or at least intangible and inexpressible. I cannot say what it is that Schubert's 'Trout' quintet does to me whenever I listen to it, but I know it does something. It goes somewhere and moves my soul with it.

One of the most foolish things a person can say is that music is neither good or bad, it's only the words that make these categories possible. Words are tangible and so they are easy to assess objectively while the movement of the soul that music evokes is primarily only felt. This does not negate the potential music has for evil but establishes it. We cannot be passive participants in an art form that speaks the language of the soul. And that is what music is - the language of the soul. The ancients realized this important truth, and thus Plato takes pains to define which sorts of music should be excluded from his ideal state. In his Republic Plato criticized those who "really look on music as if it were a mere amusement and think no harm can come from it." According to Plato music is a tool to form man's character and an instrument for the right ordering of society's legal structure. Plato is not alone, for throughout the ancient world as well as the middle ages much attention was devoted to which forms of music, and even which musical instruments, were beneficial or harmful to society. The idea today that music does not have this power over the individual or the state, that music does not contain within itself the potential for corruption, is without any precedent in the great traditions of Weston philosophy, though as we can see from Plato’s quotation, it is an error to which man has always been susceptible.

Cinematic Art & The Movement of the Soul

This essay is not about music, however, but about films. The reason I have spent some time looking at music is because I believe we can best understand what films do to us if we compare and contrast their effect with other art forms. Now films are a very interesting kind of art. By virtue of the combination of many different mediums a film has great potential for creative and imaginative expression. Beethoven could write a symphony to describe what he felt when he walked in the Austrian Alps; a skilled landscape painter can recreate the scenery of the Alps on canvas; but a film can actually take us there, so to speak. We can actually experience vicariously what a person in the film experiences. It is as if we are 'right there', and therefore there is an immediacy to emotions such as fear, happiness, violence, joy, sexual arousal, etc., which affect us in a different way then the conveyance of these emotions in other art forms. Other art forms rely more on the involvement of the participant – a composer may feel joy and then mediate that emotion in a concerto, but it is mediated and therefore requires a response from the participant to give it meaning. Though the same holds true of films it is at a significantly lesser degree. Films can appeal to our emotions on a far deeper level than any other kind of art because of their ability to re-create life's experiences. But it goes beyond being merely a recreation of a real or imaginary experience. A film can actually tell us what emotions we are supposed to be feeling at what time through judicious use of music and subtle atmospheric effects. I don't know if any if you have ever watched a film where you didn't want to feel what you knew you were supposed to be feeling at a particular point. When that happens it is a real job to struggle against it and maintain an emotional separation between yourself and what you are viewing. It should be obvious, in light of such considerations, that films have a power to move the soul that is far greater to the power inherent in other art forms - even music which is, in my opinion, the next to most powerful art. We saw with music that we cannot be detached participants, that music does speak something to the soul, and it is a question where that something is moving us. How much more do these questions become relevant when we consider films.

Often people will justify watching films with objectionable content on the grounds that, "it doesn't affect me." What they should really be saying is, "it doesn't affect me in any way that I notice." For if, as I suggested earlier, art moves the soul, then most of the time we should expect this movement to be as intangible as the soul itself. The question is not whether I can notice that a particular film has moved my soul in a bad direction, but rather the question is that, given the fact that film, like all art, will imperceptivity move my soul in one of two directions (stagnation being included in the second direction), which direction is any particular film likely to move me in? Does it edify or does it defile, does it draw me closer to God and my true self or further away? Unless the film is merely trivial, I suspect that it must do one or the other and we only deceive ourselves if we think we can unaffectedly stand outside and filter out that which is bad. The irony of it is that the things we can filter out of a film are precisely those things that we are not as susceptible to being affected by. The influences from films that reach us at the most subliminal level beyond our cognitive recognition affect us far more profoundly than those things we may recognize and consciously 'filter out'. It is like sitting and listening to a song with bad lyrics and unedifying music. We may filter out the words and not be influenced by them because words are the language of the mind over which our will can exert a degree of control, but we cannot do that so easily with the music since that is the language of the soul. Even with words it is not always possible for the soul to be uninfluenced by them, for the combination of music and words can impart to the words an emotional atmosphere and power that are not present in words that are merely read.

So there are these two levels - the conscious level of the mind that we may control vs. the unconscious level of the soul that we cannot so easily control – that operate in films as well as music. If it is true that music with words has some scope for overlap between these two levels, how much more true is it that in films there is infinite scope for overlap between these two levels. The fact that there is such indistinguishable blending in a film between the level that we may consciously filter out of our minds and the deeper level that speaks intangible words to the soul, should make us extremely cautious about what we watch.

“It doesn’t affect me.”

Building on the above idea, I now turn to address the question of sex in films. Though I may seem to have gone far a field from the original question of this essay, I hope that the ideas I have already outlined provide a groundwork for assessing this question.

The main justification I have heard people offer for watching sex in films is also the same justification I hear for watching violence, namely, "it doesn't affect me." Often those who take this line are juxtaposed with 'sensitive' people who are offended by such content. As we have already seen, the artistic nature of films mean that they can affect us even we do not recognize it. However, in the case of sex I believe one can point to tangible evidence for how they affect people.

One piece of evidence lies in the common defence, already quoted, that people make for watching such films. The fact that people can truthfully say that sex in films does not affect them is the surest proof that it already has had a very marked effect upon them. It proves that such a person has become desensitised to sex through frequent exposure. Put simply, seeing a naked person on the screen, or watching two people having sex, ought to arouse sexual feelings in the viewer. To illustrate why this is so I want to take a situation that Rabbi Friedman tells about in his book on modesty. He explains about some co-ed campers who shared sleeping bags. When he challenged them about this they assured him that it was nothing sexual. Now, is it true that there is 'nothing sexual' in just sharing a sleeping bag with someone of the opposite sex, or in co-ed wrestling and co-ed bathrooms for that matter? For many people today the answer seems unfortunately to be yes, there is nothing sexual in these activities. I say 'unfortunately' because certain things should have sexual connotation. If we reach the point where nothing fazes us, where we can share sleeping bags with members of the opposite sex or play beach volleyball with virtually unclad men and women or where we can watch sex scenes in films and not experience sexual feelings, then it is we who are the losers. What have we lost? We have lost an ability to be naturally sexual. It is similar to when a person constantly represses his/her emotions and eventually finds it difficult to be naturally emotional.

Our sexual sensitivity is constantly being eroded through unnatural mediums. Our bodies were designed to have sex but not to watch other people having sex. So what happens when we do watch these things? Well, if a film viewer is a Christian he will likely be constantly trying to detach himself from participating emotionally in the sexual scenes he views. He purposely turns away from watching the scene in such a way as to give him sexual stimulation. That is to say, he tries to watch it ‘philosophically’ as a clinical and detached observer. But notice what is happening here – he is practicing de-sexualising himself in exactly the same way as the co-ed campers I mentioned earlier. In short, he is practicing sexual repression.

Repression vs. Sensitivity

The same point could be made about sexual stimuli in real life situations. There was a time when a woman's bare leg was provocative - now days many men do not even bat an eye to see a woman in a bikini…or less. The frequency of exposure to immodesty has thus eliminated the provocative element from apparel that would once have been implicit with erotic suggestion. What does this mean other than that we are becoming less sexually responsive?

Suppose we have two people, one who feels that he is ‘liberated’ enough to watch films with adult content, and another who finds that content too provocative to comfortably watch. Suppose further the ‘liberated’ person were to say to the ‘sensitive’ person that they needed to overcome their hang-ups about sex. In such a case, the liberated person has really proved that he is the one who is ashamed of sex, for he is ashamed of the sensitive person being sexual. He is ashamed of the sensitive person being so sexual that he/she cannot simply switch off and view these scenes in a detached way.

In today’s world we are everywhere encouraged to feel ashamed of our sexuality. For example, if I cannot concentrate on beach volleyball because the woman playing opposite me is dressed in her underwear, or if I refuse to hire a female as a secretary because I cannot detach myself enough to feel nothing whilst alone with her day after day, then in all likelihood I would be the one who is seen as having a problem with my sexuality, not the person who can detach himself in these things. But who is really being sexually repressed here? We don't hear very much about the kind of sexual repression that results in being able to de-sexualise ourselves in environments or situations that would otherwise signalise the erotic. Nevertheless, the de-sexualising that results from immodesty, promiscuity and pornography (which includes films with adult content) is just as much a form of repression as those modes to which we normally ascribe the word.

Conclusion

Modesty in the films we view (i.e., in what we set before our eyes), like modesty in how we dress (i.e., in what we set before the eyes of others), keeps us sexy, for it prevents the de-sexualising of those things that should excite us with erotic suggestion. More importantly though, it keeps us from becoming de-sexualised as people. So next time somebody tells you they are going to watch a film that has sexual content in it, tell them that they are too sexually repressed!

Though this paper has addressed sexual content in films, the same arguments can equally apply to films that contain violence. Violence ought to shock us, and we should never become so fazed by it that it ceases to give us horror, just as we should never become so used to sex that the it ceases to have a sexual effect on us. As soon as somebody tells me that the violence in a film does not bother him/her or the sexual content does not affect him/her, that is when I know that person has watched too much. That is when it is time to turn off the television.

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